In yesterday’s New York Times, Andrew Revkin reposted an excerpt from David Ropeik’s book “How Risky Is It, Really?” His purpose was to draw attention to Ropeik’s concern that society needs to figure out how to manage people with “poor” risk perceptions:
Ropeik put the question thusly:
How does society deal with the dangers of The Perception Gap when, no matter how well informed people are nor how well-educated, their subjective interpretations of information still don’t match the evidence — in ways that create risk, for themselves, or for society?
And Revkin ends his post with this comment:
My hope is to provoke a wider conversation about an important issue — not just vaccines — but what society is supposed to do when, because of our innately subjective perception of risk, our perceptions of risk create risks all by themselves.
First of all, I’m not sure I agree that our risk perceptions create risks. They leave us unable or unwilling to prevent risks that can be avoided. They allow us to do things that a rational cost-benefit analysis would say are unwise. But, to me, that isn’t the same as creating new risks.
Secondly, and probably more importantly, both Revkin and Ropeik appear to have made a fundamental assumption: That people’s failures to align their subjective responses to risk information and messages to agree (whatever that means) with the evidence implies that people will never respond to risk information and messages.
Really?!? We’re so confident that we understand both the way people think about risk and the science of communicating chance, safety, harm, possibility, prevention, fear, reassurance, and everything else associated with risk that we can take our previous failures as evidence that the task is impossible?
Ropeik talks a lot about fear in his writings about risk communication, and I share his belief that communications about risk need to focus much more on the emotional side of risk than on the cognitively-focused facts that are rarely persuasive.
Let’s look at a few facts that on the one hand seem irreconcilable and yet are true:
- People smoke despite decades of messages and now gruesome images being plastered on every pack. This isn’t because they don’t know it’s dangerous.
- People ride motorcycles without helmets (unless they live in states where this is illegal, and sometimes even then). They may or may not understand the risk at the population level, but I’ll bet you it’s crossed their mind that there might be some risk with doing so.
- People refuse to take vaccines because of concerns about risks that are neither scientifically proven nor particularly prevalent even if they did exist.
In other words, people keep doing things they know are dangerous and don’t do things that might actually be completely safe out of concern about the possibility of risk. These behaviors don’t reflect “understanding” of the risks. In addition, while these behaviors are all in some way emotionally driven, they show that the mere presence or absence of risk feelings is also insufficient to define our behavior in risky situations.
In fact, if anything, the above examples suggest an interesting pattern: Things we know are risky, like riding motorcycles without helmets, we tend to try to think of as somehow being safe.
If you don’t think that applies to you, consider this: Despite all the media coverage of airline accidents and terrorism, the most dangerous part of an airline trip is the drive to the airport in your car. We all tend to think of driving as safe, otherwise we wouldn’t do it. But of course we’ve all seen horrific car accidents with our own eyes. And yet today I’ll go, get in my car, pick up my kid, and drive home without any undue concern. I know it’s risky, so I make it feel more safe.
The same pattern is true in reverse. For things we think of as safe, we react strongly to any possibility of risk. Vaccines, BPA, the toxin du jour. Most people are genuinely outraged when something they thought was safe turns out not to be in even the smallest ways.
In short, it seems to me that in some ways, people are simply contrarian regarding risk. Tell us one thing, we try to believe the opposite.
So, let me pose a new question for discussion: Is it possible that risk communicators often create the very emotions we try to prevent by trying so hard to convey (relative) safety that we trigger people’s innate contrariness and evoke concern where it is less needed, and vice versa?
Food for thought.
Brian J. Zikmund-Fisher is an Assistant Professor of Health Behavior & Health Education at the University of Michigan School of Public Health and a member of the University of Michigan Risk Science Center and the Center for Bioethics and Social Sciences in Medicine. He specializes in risk communication to inform health and medical decision making.